Luck of the Draw
by Kryal
Summary: When Plagg loses a Chat Noir, it's usually to outside circumstances. Even a cat runs out of lives eventually, and sometimes the odds are just stacked too high. All too often, Tikki loses her Ladybugs to themselves. The downsides of bad luck are straightforward. The consequences of good luck are far more insidious.
_When Plagg loses a Chat Noir, it's usually to outside circumstances. Even a cat runs out of lives eventually, and sometimes the odds are just stacked too high._

 _All too often, Tikki loses her Ladybugs to themselves._

 _The downsides of bad luck are straightforward. The consequences of good luck are far more insidious._

* * *

 **LUCK OF THE DRAW**

* * *

Tikki worries about Marinette sometimes.

Not often. The girl is one of the best that Tikki has ever chosen – dedicated and passionate, but also warm-hearted and cheerful, quick to defend a friend but also willing (usually) to grit her teeth and get the job done even when her duty calls on her to help an enemy.

But Tikki can't deny that the warning signs are there.

A certain swagger when Ladybug goes to face the latest akuma. A tendency to dismiss the advice of others – especially those she considers beneath her, morally or otherwise. The easy acceptance of the assumption that while _she_ most certainly can hold her own against any akuma, Chat Noir will always need help.

To be fair, the last is true enough. Chat Noir _does_ need Ladybug's help to purify akuma, now that Plagg refuses to teach his chosen how to use Jinx.

Tikki can't hold that choice against him, though. The last time a Chat Noir had used Jinx had been during Europe's Dark Ages – and that Chat Noir had been denounced by the very people she'd been defending as a witch and a devil worshipper. She'd nearly been stoned to death by her own community before she and Plagg had managed to escape and vanish into the night.

Tikki hadn't seen Plagg again for years. Decades. He'd stayed with that Chat Noir until the end of her natural life – trying to make up, with his presence, for what she'd lost because of his powers.

Since then, Plagg has refused to ever teach another Chat Noir the Jinx, the counterpart to Lucky Charm that, as Lucky Charm allows Ladybug's Miracle to restore what an akuma has destroyed, would enable Chat Noir to use Cataclysm to _unmake_ the evil wrought by an akuma. It's made things harder. Harder on Tikki's Ladybugs, who have to shoulder the responsibility of being the _only_ one capable of actually undoing an akuma's evil. Harder on Plagg's Chat Noirs, who have to resign themselves to always standing subordinate to Ladybug, rather than as the equal and balancing power that they were meant to be.

Plagg doesn't care. "No Chat of mine," he'd said flatly, when Tikki had tentatively asked, "is going to face down a mob made of their own _friends and family_. Never again."

Tikki can't really blame him. The power of Ladybug, the power to bless oneself and one's allies with good fortune, was welcomed, even lauded, by bystanders. The power of Chat Noir, the power to curse one's enemies with misfortune… often drew a far more ambivalent response. Even when the final results of the two powers came out to the same thing.

The Ladybug of that era had been no help, either. They'd fought a long, hard battle for years against the akuma, in those days… and Tikki's Ladybug had fallen prey to all the worst consequences of Ladybug's powers.

When Plagg loses one of his Chat Noirs, it's usually to outside circumstances. Even a cat runs out of lives eventually, and sometimes the odds are stacked too high for even Chat Noir's ability to flick the enemy's scale to make enough of a difference.

All too often, Tikki loses her Ladybugs to _themselves_.

Never to evil. No Ladybug _or_ Chat Noir has ever fallen to evil, or to the whispers of the akuma; Tikki and Plagg choose the new bearers of the Miraculouses carefully. Ladybug is, and always will be, a hero.

But being a hero doesn't always mean being a good person.

Good luck is insidious. Ladybugs get used to it. Rely on it. And, slowly, over time, they begin to forget that luck is, by definition, _unearned good fortune_. They begin to take it for granted. To take _credit_ for it, and assume that good fortune is theirs by _right_ , that they somehow _deserve_ it.

And thus, by definition, anyone less fortunate than they must _not_ deserve such a boon.

It doesn't always happen. Sometimes – once in a _very_ great while – Tikki chances on a chosen whose heart is big enough that all the good fortune in the world can't make them blind to the sorrow and pain of the less fortunate, the hard choices that have to be made when one's back is to the wall and there is no Lucky Charm to give you something better than the lesser of two evils. Sometimes she gets lucky – so to speak – and something happens to wake a Ladybug up before they slide too far.

And sometimes Tikki doesn't, and her Ladybugs grow arrogant and cruel – not with malice, like the Bourgeois girl, but with a simple lack of empathy, an inability to remember what it means to _not_ live life with a Lucky Charm at one's beck and call.

Tikki and Plagg have learned to adapt. Plagg chooses the resilient ones – children who have already learned one of life's hardest lessons, that the world can be cruel for no reason and that sometimes all one can do is roll with the punches and come up laughing, because why cry over spilled milk when you can turn it into cheese?

And Tikki… Tikki chooses people like Marinette – bright people, _good_ people, people who could be so much _more_ , if they just had a little more confidence, a little more faith that the world won't chew them up and spit them out if they take a chance. It makes convincing them that they _can_ be Ladybug hard, at first, but… Ladybug gives them strength, gives them courage, gives them confidence. And then Tikki draws a line in the sand, forcing the transformation to break whenever Ladybug slips into using the Lucky Charm for selfish reasons, so that they _remember_ that the good luck is a gift and not something to be taken for granted.

And when the need for Ladybug is over and the world is safe again… Tikki leaves them, before new-won strength becomes callousness, courage becomes arrogance, or confidence becomes _over_ -confidence.

Even if she desperately wants to stay.

Plagg does stay. But Plagg's chosen have different needs. There's never been a black mask without tragedy hidden beneath it, and Tikki tries not to wonder what pain lies behind the laughter in his current chosen's green eyes. Plagg likes to find children who have learned to stand on their own, and give them something _more_ , a life where they don't _have_ to be alone. A way to give others the happy ending they themselves were denied. And much as he loves to pretend to be self-centered, the grumpy old cat would never be so cruel as to take that away from his Chat Noirs just because they aren't absolutely _needed_ anymore.

Besides. The longer he stays with his chosen, the more free cheese he can cadge off them. Cats are born opportunists, after all.

And cupboard love is simple, and honest, and easy for even the most wounded heart to trust.

Tikki envies him that freedom.

But who knows. Marinette is one of her _best_ – as good a fit as Plagg's new Chat Noir, and she hasn't seen a bonding like that in _centuries_. The girl gets a _little_ full of herself – but she's at the age where that sort of thing happens sometimes, regardless of magic and Miraculouses, and when something comes to remind her not to take her new powers of luck for granted, she takes that lesson to heart.

So for now, Tikki will stay, and hope. And provide a comforting and sometimes chiding voice as her new charge feels her way through this new existence Tikki has brought down on Marinette's head. Maybe Marinette will finally confess her crush, and Tikki will get a chance to test her own sneaking suspicion that if she crept into Adrien's bag during school, she'd find her old partner and counterpart cheerfully catnapping away a Camembert-induced cheese coma.

Tikki tries not to let her own powers of luck go to her head. But she's going to take advantage of fortune when it knocks!

* * *

AN: The adverse effects of chance good luck on people's ability to empathize and even accurately assess reality are a _real thing_ , tested in any number of psychological experiments. It's amazing what even a small amount of luck will do; studies have shown that something as small as _finding a dime in a vending machine_ can lead to people being significantly more likely to believe that an attractive member of the opposite sex is flirting with them a few minutes later, for example.

Unfortunately, too much good fortune can have the same effect of too much privilege: you forget that other people might not get the same lucky chance as you. You start taking it for granted. Or worse, you assume that there's something _wrong_ with other people because they didn't get that lucky break. That they didn't deserve it, and you did.

A good analogy for this might be Joy at the beginning of _Inside Out_. Joy is a bright, kind, happy, cheerful person… but her actions towards Sadness are flat-out _bullying_ , even though she has absolutely no ill intentions whatsoever. She simply lacks the empathy to understand Sadness, because her own experience has been so bright that it's blinded her.

And Marinette _does_ occasionally slip into this sort of arrogance, in-series – usually in the form of her usual banter/teasing with Chat crossing the line into mockery or dismissal. Sometimes it's in other forms. (Seriously, Marinette. If you can't bear to let doll villains win, then give the hero dolls to the kid, but _let the toddler win_ sometimes, or at least give her a fair fight. And laughing at a boy who's been turned into a ridiculous-looking girl and telling him he can't help when he just saved your skin? The amount of pure _social courage_ Chat Noir showed by picking himself up and carrying on, even with the girl he admires _laughing at him_ , is beyond what most _adults_ can muster, let alone a fifteen-year-old boy.)

Some of that is likely to be teenage maturity issues – but the fact remains that Marinette and Ladybug are not perfect, they _can_ slip over the line from confidence into arrogance and even unintentional cruelty, and if no one calls her on it (as Chat often does, and I love him for it – emotionally intelligent guy bucking gender stereotypes!), those habits could turn out very badly indeed.

Although, for the record, I've seen no evidence in the series to support the fanon idea that Marinette is inherently lucky (in fact, the Origins episodes imply she started out the exact opposite!), any more than I've seen evidence for Adrien being inherently _unlucky_. They actually seem… well, to have a more or less even spread of good and bad luck. (Possibly more on the bad luck side for both of them – they're _protagonists_ , which means Stuff Happens to and around them.)

Besides. Having one character attract good luck and the other attract bad doesn't really make for a balanced story, because it gives a benefit to one character and a handicap to another, rather than both getting benefits _and_ handicaps. So I tend to treat their "good luck/bad luck" as Ladybug _attracting_ good luck and Chat Noir _inflicting_ bad luck. Which could explain why Chat Noir does best when he's faced with crowds of minions – maximum chaos for Murphy's Law to play with!

(This would also explain why in some episodes, Chat Noir's ring seems to run down faster than Ladybug's earrings – sometimes when he doesn't even use Cataclysm! He may not be using his _big_ power, but he's still burning energy to fight armies.)

Speaking of: I headcanon that, yes, Chat does too have the ability to exorcise – the whole symbolism of the yin-yang box at the opening implies the two are supposed to be _equals_ , and that means that Chat should be just as capable of handling a crisis alone as Ladybug. (Plus, the feminist in me objects. You don't need to make the male character less powerful in order to show that the woman is strong. Awesomeness is not a zero-sum game, people!) Making Cataclysm his counterpart to Ladybug's "miraculous light" or whatever you call her finishing move makes sense to me, because the power to take things apart works as a counterpart to the power to heal or restore. Which means his missing power is a counterpart to Ladybug's Lucky Charm. Given that Lucky Charm works by being a "one in a million" sort of object that lets Ladybug pull off an improbable plan, I came up with "Jinx" – rather than a lucky charm for the heroes, an _unlucky_ charm – or rather, curse of bad luck – inflicted on the enemy. Same results, different ways of getting there.


End file.
